So-called “farmer-herder conflicts” dominate the Chadian media landscape to such an extent that they reinforce the perception of their temporal and spatial permanence. In September 2022, the newspaper Le Pays sounded the alarm over the severity of the situation in the South of the country: “Farmers and herders […] are clashing… some villages have been burned down, more than 15 people killed and dozens injured. The situation is alarming”1. Headlines of this kind are common for anyone familiar with current events in this vast Central African country2. According to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), these “farmer-herder conflicts” alone accounted for 42% of violent incidents reported in the first half of 2024, with a strong concentration in the South, where approximately 77% of the confrontations occurred3. While such conflicts are highly mediatised, they also form part of a much longer historical trajectory.
It is important to emphasise that agropastoral conflicts are by no means a new phenomenon, whether in southern Chad or across the wider Lake Chad Basin. They are embedded in a long history of often fragile coexistence between farmers and herders, marked by constantly shifting balances of power. Recent academic literature broadly agrees that these tensions cannot be reduced to a traditional antagonism; rather, they should be understood as manifestations of deeper transformations in land tenure, access to natural resources, and political authority. Two major positions emerge from recent research. The first interprets this violence as a symptom of a land governance crisis, catalysed by structural factors such as demographic pressure, agricultural extensification, and climate change4. The second – now gaining ground as the dominant framework – seeks to move beyond surface-level analysis and interrogate the historical, political and symbolic logics that underpin these confrontations5, along with their instrumentalisation for the purposes of control or clientelist redistribution6.
This article aligns with the latter perspective, exploring an angle that remains underexamined: the role of the religious economy in the dynamics of rural tensions. By “religious economy”, we refer to all activities involving the production, distribution, and consumption of spiritual goods, which mobilise religious solidarity as a form of both symbolic and material capital. In Chad, this economy is rooted in a “collective interpretive framework” shaped by the memory of past conflicts and institutionalised through mechanisms such as Quranic schools. From this perspective, the religious entrepreneur – exemplified here by the promoters of Quranic schools – is an individual who leverages religious expertise and symbolic capital to shape a socio-economic model. This model involves mediating conflicts, legitimising one’s position through public acts of peacemaking, mobilising philanthropic support, and transforming religious influence into institutional resources.
Although the promoters of Quranic schools are emblematic of the religious and social dynamics under study, they represent only one category among several actors. The intention is not to portray them as the sole agents of this religious economy. As this article is being written, clashes between farmers and herders continue to stir deep sensitivities in Chad, in a context where religious affiliation remains a delicate issue – often avoided due to its symbolic weight and its potential for conflict. The aim here is therefore not to assign blame, but to offer a different lens through which to understand these conflicts, at a time when classical explanatory models appear increasingly inadequate.
This article demonstrates that the promotion of Arabic-Islamic education has today become a promising sector, actively invested in by religious entrepreneurs who see in it opportunities for social integration and legitimation. These actors play an active role in reshaping social relations linked to agropastoral conflicts by drawing on a religious economy that combines educational practices, pastoral mobility, and land negotiation. The analysis is based on fieldwork conducted between September and December 2023, as part of a doctoral thesis on the financing of Arabic-Islamic education in Chad. Particular attention is given here to a southern province that has been especially affected by agropastoral conflicts, both in terms of their intensity and recurrence. Due to the sensitivity of the topic and the security risks for those involved, the name of the province has been anonymised, as have the identities of the individuals interviewed during the research. This ethical choice aims to preserve the confidentiality of the exchanges while ensuring the sociological rigour of the analysis. The methodological approach combines semi-structured interviews with promoters of Quranic schools, local leaders, agricultural producers, and pastoralists, along with direct observation of the concrete functioning of this religious economy. The collected data show that religious entrepreneurs engage in a complex process of legitimation, seeking to build social recognition through their role as mediators between conflicting groups. In this way, they establish themselves as key intermediaries between nomadic pastoralists and farming communities in the South, in exchange for resources – constituting the core of their economic model.
This mediating role is not without consequences. It generates tensions surrounding land use and fuels competition among local actors. This article thus seeks to shift the analytical lens, showing that violence does not always originate in the fields or along transhumance routes, but rather takes root in imaginaries and regimes of legitimacy. The objective is therefore to move beyond the obvious explanations, to uncover the interplay of actors at the heart of these conflicts and to better understand the social logics underlying rural violence.
The article is structured in three parts. The first section revisits the historical and symbolic foundations of agropastoral conflicts, demonstrating that a structural matrix exists, rooted in the historicity of a Chadian social field shaped by religious, territorial, and political dynamics. The second part explores the emergence of a religious economy, focusing on its actors, their relationships, and interactions. The third section examines the ambivalent effects of this economy on tensions over land access in general, and agropastoral conflicts in particular.
I. Religion, Land and Livestock: A Social Field in Crisis
In Chad, religious identity is far from a purely private matter. It is omnipresent in the public sphere and, as a structuring matrix of the social field, it plays a central role in shaping social relations, access to resources, positions, and spaces. Islam currently holds demographic predominance. According to the U.S. State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom, nearly 58% of Chadians are Muslims, compared to approximately 34% Christians and 4% adherents of so-called traditional religions7. These figures, however, obscure the fluidity of religious affiliation, which in practice varies according to context, alliances, and constraints, and intertwines with ethnic, linguistic, and economic dimensions.
The Chadian social field – whose religious foundations have been highlighted by Jean-Pierre Magnant – has historically formed around a tension between two contrasting relationships to space, mobility, production, and the sacred8. One, associated with the Sahelian North, is rooted in Islam, pastoralism, and trade; the other, the South, is grounded in sedentary agriculture and a form of religiosity, both Christian and traditional, centred on earth-based cults. As early as the precolonial period, the North saw the development of Islamised kingdoms where sultans combined political power with religious legitimacy. There, Islam became not only a faith, but also a legal framework, a form of diplomacy, an economy, and a vehicle for social regulation. As Jean-Claude Zeltner noted, the North did not identify with Central Africa but oriented itself “organically” towards the East, “the Nile Valley, Cairo, Mecca”9. It was also through Islam that a local variant of Arabic spread, which became a language of economic exchange – particularly in the South.
In contrast, while the North viewed land as a space for movement and economic enhancement, the South sacralised it. Among the Sara – the largest ethnic group in the South – land is a site of interaction between the living and invisible forces. Access to land is mediated by land chiefs (chefs de terre), who act as both spiritual and social regulators. Even with the arrival of the first Christian missions, conversion to Christianity did not erase this conception. Agriculture is more than an economic activity; it is a collective, ritual, and political vocation.
In the South, the figure of the nomadic herder is not merely that of a livestock keeper in search of pasture. It embodies a plural identity – economic, religious, linguistic, and regional. The herder does not travel only with his herds; he carries with him an imaginary, a territorial memory, and a social order that give structure to his mobility and meaning to his temporary presence. This mobility often comes into tension with the sedentary logic of ritual agriculture, which is founded on a very different relationship to space and time. As a result, conflicts between herders and farmers go far beyond local contingencies. They reactivate deeper structural and symbolic oppositions embedded in the historical cleavages of the Chadian social field – cleavages that were further reinforced by colonisation.
French colonisation at the beginning of the 20th century, while administratively unifying the North and South, ultimately served to reinforce pre-existing fractures. The South was integrated into the colonial economy as the so-called “useful Chad”, transformed into a centre of cotton production and a land of Francophone elites, fostered by Christian missions and the expansion of schooling. In contrast, the North remained peripheral. It continued to develop Quranic schools and to culturally resist the colonial school system, which was seen as incompatible with Islamic traditions and perceived by the colonial administration as a potential political threat, subject to monitoring and even repression.
After independence in 1960, these asymmetrical dynamics translated into unequal access to the state and its resources. Southern elites quickly took over administrative positions, exposing the fact that the postcolonial Chadian state had emerged from a foundational exclusion of the Muslim North. This exclusion gave rise to a widespread sense of resentment that soon evolved into organised rejection. The regime of François Tombalbaye deepened this divide. Through the establishment of a one-party system in 1964 and the targeted repression of northern militants, southern authority was imposed abruptly, often through abusive measures. In 1965, the Mangalmé uprising against administrative violence in central Chad paved the way for the formation of the National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale, FROLINAT), a rebel movement with national ambitions and an Arab-Muslim orientation, laying the foundations for decades of sociopolitical instability, culminating in the civil war of 1979.
The “events of 1979,” as they are commonly referred to in popular discourse, gradually became the structuring matrix of current agropastoral tensions, rooted in political, religious, and territorial divisions. This historical turning point marked not only the end but also the failure of a unified national project. Religious and regional affiliations re-emerged as primary sources of rival identities. Pastoralism became a lever of political power and economic rent, through which relations of domination were exercised. This new configuration gradually eroded the traditional modes of coexistence between farmers and herders, giving rise to relations of mistrust and competition. Religious and symbolic cleavages, once primarily cultural, were converted into instruments of identity-based mobilisation, becoming inseparable from agropastoral dynamics.
Thus emerged a latent but structural conflictuality, further exacerbated from the 1990s onward by the instrumentalisation of territorial control and herd mobility in pursuit of power. Even today, this architecture of conflict endures. Tensions between farmers and herders are the manifestation of a historical system in which land, livestock, and religious, geographic, and linguistic affiliations are entangled, structuring contemporary violence. This interpretive framework helps explain why agropastoral clashes cannot be reduced to isolated local incidents but are instead deeply rooted in a long-standing geopolitical logic.
II. Religious Economy in Practice
In Chad, a country officially secular, students at Quranic schools – traditional institutions of Arabic-Islamic education – remain largely marginalised by public policy and excluded from formal employment opportunities. Lacking integration into conventional employment pathways, many former students, who have become Islamic scholars to a greater or lesser extent, are now self-employed. Since the 1990s, this educational space has gradually been transformed into a genuine arena for socio-economic integration. Former students now find in the promotion of Quranic schools a form of religious entrepreneurship that articulates religious capital with economic rationality. This economy mobilises the memory of the “events of 1979” to legitimise their role as unique actors in national reconciliation. In a sense, these religious entrepreneurs shape pastoral dynamics in the South, where land resources – although more abundant than in the North – remain difficult to access due to intensified competition driven by both climate change and demographic pressure.
Memory of War and the Market for Reconciliation
To establish their legitimacy, religious entrepreneurs invest in a strategic positioning based on their role as social mediators and agents of peace, local development, and national dialogue. They rely on narratives of collective resilience and demonstrate their capacity to mobilise both symbolic and material resources in order to consolidate their presence in the public sphere.
One founder of a Quranic school, referring to the 1979 crisis and the divisions it caused, described it as “a dangerous illness that destroys everything, wherever it settles”i. He added that “if my school had existed before 1979, perhaps we could have avoided the divisions that continue to tear us apart”. He presents his Quranic school as a space for communal living that brings together Chadians “from Aouzou to Sido”, the country’s northernmost and southernmost points. The school is presented as a bastion of “living together” (vivre ensemble), where more than twenty ethnic groups from both the North and South coexistii. Like other cheikhs who promote Quranic schools, he cultivates the image of an inclusive, tolerant, and hospitable Islam. His discourse explicitly opposes what he calls a “counterfeit Islam” – a distorted, hierarchical version of the faith that perpetuates the social fractures inherited from the crisis of the 1970s.
This posture – at once pacifying, critical, and reconciliatory – functions as a strategic resource for these religious entrepreneurs. It enables them to assume the role of intermediaries able to transcend religious and territorial divides. Another Quranic school leader, for instance, stated that his means allowed him to intervene “up to 100 kilometres from here” to resolve intra-Muslim conflicts before the state was even informediii. This visible effectiveness reflects a strong anchoring in local dynamics, where they act as pragmatic agents of peacemaking. By transforming the memory of conflict into a unifying narrative, these cheikhs reinforce their legitimacy in the public space. They are also deeply involved in the organisation of the National Peace Days, initiated by the authorities in 2011 as part of a broader national reconciliation project. Their active participation in these events institutionalises their role in sociopolitical mediation and strengthens their position as key actors in managing and preventing local conflicts.
At once spiritual guides and educational entrepreneurs, the founders of Quranic schools also build their legitimacy on asceticism, humility, and collective achievement. They emphasise the modest origins of their schools, highlighting their establishment in remote, infrastructure-poor areas as evidence of faith and perseverance. The initial absence of comfort is framed as proof of sincerity. Such narratives establish symbolic distinction. Schools that started “with nothing at all, with only the shade of a mango tree as shelter”iv are perceived as more legitimate.
In addition, they engage their congregations in a form of social marketing. The story of success becomes a resource to attract new supporters. One parent explained: “When wealthy people come and leave their children in a school deep in the bush, it enhances the image of Islam”v. Through this register of justification, the promoters build a space of religious prescription whose benefits are also economic.
All the symbolic capital thus accumulated is converted into material capital. This is evident in the regular flow of donations – both modest and substantial – received by these educational entrepreneurs: mats, food supplies, religious texts, motorbikes, fuel, and even the contact lists of high-ranking officials in the public administration. One cheikh, founder of a Quranic school, reported that in 2010, President Idriss Déby visited his school, praised his commitment to peaceful coexistence, and pledged his support. This presidential recognition granted him reinforced moral authority, which proved essential to his capacity to mobilise resources. In the aftermath, the school received financial backing, notably for the construction of a perimeter wall funded by a senior figure in the ruling party, a Christian from the South. Costing several tens of millions of CFA francs (more than €15,000), this wall stands as a concrete symbol of the school’s public legitimisation and its integration into politico-religious redistribution circuits.
In short, the most influential cheikhs at the local level become privileged interlocutors for political elites seeking visibility. They participate in the legitimisation of political power, revealing a deep entanglement between religious and political spheres – what may be seen as a form of co-construction.
Territories of Peace and Politics of Land
Religious entrepreneurs invest so fervently in the promotion of peace and intercommunal coexistence because it lies at the heart of a material economy rooted in a relationship between actor and system – one that enables access to both tangible and intangible resources. From this perspective, the peace they preach is not merely a moral imperative but also a tool of economic accumulation. By mobilising the religious discourse of reconciliation, they embed their actions within a moral economy that transforms solidarity into a lever for influence and the consolidation of acquired positions. Southern Chad lies at the core of this strategy.
Perceived as both a place of refuge and a breadbasket rich in natural resources, the South has, since the 1990s, become a privileged anchor point for religious entrepreneurs seeking material autonomy. The establishment of the largest Quranic school in the country within this region illustrates a broader movement of territorial appropriation for educational, economic, and symbolic purposes. The choice of location is not incidental: the school is situated in a village on the right bank of a perennial river, in an ecosystem marked by fertile soil, abundant pastureland, and reliable water reserves. This favourable ecological setting rekindles a longstanding tradition of attraction to southern territories – already noted by French explorer Casimir Maistre in 1902, who described in his notebooks a “land where water is never scarce, and where, even in the absence of flowing rivers, animals can always find small ponds”10. This village has thus become a resource territory, chosen to host an expanding religious economy built on the ability to mobilise, redistribute, and secure wealth.
By strengthening their local foothold, religious entrepreneurs establish themselves in the South by constructing a dynamic community economy. In doing so, they transform Quranic schools into real-life “open sesame” mechanisms, granting access to southern lands in a context of intensifying land competition. Herders, traders, and farmers affiliate themselves with these institutions to gain access to land, water, and local social networks. In areas where such institutions are established, local residents describe the students as “great farmers who have come to teach the natives new ways of working the land”vi. One Quranic school founder explains: “In our school, all are brothers, for Allah says that all Muslims are brothers”vii, thereby sacralising social relations and conferring upon them religious legitimacy. Through this discourse, he establishes a gift economy in which contributing is equated with believing, and generosity becomes performative. The logic corresponds to one of ritualized gift giving – a configuration in which solidarity is translated into symbolic recognition and social capital. In practical terms, wealth circulates in various forms: a merchant entrusts his herd to “a brother”, profits are shared, and reinvested into other sectors such as trade or mechanised farmingviii. As in Senegalese Mouridism, this religious economy weaves together spirituality, labour, and prosperity11.
However, religious entrepreneurs do not merely accumulate: they also invest in securing their institutions’ positions through targeted redistribution mechanisms. One Quranic school has initiated a microfinance system reportedly operating “24 hours a day, 7 days a week”ix, offering interest-free loans to local farmers. This mechanism eases economic constraints, especially during the agricultural season. Giving becomes a calculated act – a means of asserting symbolic dominance through a moral economy12. It is as though the goal were to penetrate social imaginaries and neutralise, through carefully timed offerings, any latent mistrust. These entrepreneurs remain highly attuned to opportunities for public visibility as legitimate actors, often participating in the enthronement ceremonies of chefs de terre, during which they present gifts, boubous, cattle and ensure their physical presence is noted. Among other outcomes, these entrepreneurs consolidate local alliances and transform solidarity into a tool for regulation. These relational practices, which shape interactions between local cheikhs and customary authorities, contrast sharply with the often-circulated image of a conquering Islam hostile to traditional religions or Christianity13. On the contrary, they illustrate a form of pragmatic and peaceful coexistence between Islam and other local faiths.
III. Quranic Schools: Actors of a Divisive Peace?
The emergence of Quranic schools’ founders as local mediators must be understood within a broader context of legitimacy crisis affecting public institutions and their regulatory capacities. In this weakened space, these religious figures appear as credible alternatives, drawing upon their authority as moral leaders endowed with the capacity to arbitrate agropastoral and land-related conflicts. However, this posture conceals a shift in the function of these institutions.
While they do contribute to the resolution of local disputes, their role is also evolving in ways that feed into the very dynamics of conflict they claim to address. In other words, the religious economy that underpins the business model of these religious entrepreneurs may simultaneously reproduce or even exacerbate the same tensions it seeks to resolve. By attracting nomadic herders in search of pasture, Quranic schools are increasingly transformed into incubators for the sedentarisation of pastoralists. Over time, these schools have become hubs of settlement for transhumant herders, around which infrastructure develops – such as mechanical boreholes and electrified dwellings – surrounded by the thatched-roof homes of local farming communities. These signs of sedentarisation, absent just a decade ago, now fuel frustration among farmers, who perceive them as a form of encroachment under the guise of religion. Often supported by local administrative authorities, Quranic schools are granted facilitated access to land and authorisations to establish additional schools based on the same model14,15,16. The involvement of administrative figures – frequently local elites who have embraced Islam – fuels the perception that the state, whether consciously or not, is enabling the expansion of Islamic structures into regions historically dominated by Christian or animist populations. For many farmers, this presence is interpreted as a form of religious entrenchment, economic colonisation, and land dispossession.
From 2022 onwards, this latent conflict took on more radical overtones. In one southern province, violent clashes between herders and farmers led to the creation of a “crisis committee” composed of urban elites and university students, which publicly accused Quranic schools of harbouring weapons and acting as support bases for violent herders17. Widely circulated on social media, this narrative adopted the tone of an existential threat: the Quranic school was no longer merely a religious institution but had become a potentially destabilising actor. This polarisation has also seeped into the educational spaces. Students, depending on their family and regional backgrounds, reproduce the same divisions. Some identify with the farmers, others with the herders – calling into question the very ideal of religious unity that the schools promote on a daily basis. In this sense, the Quranic school becomes a microcosm of national tensions, structured by dynamics of class, ethnicity, territory, and geographic belonging. Rather than overcoming these divisions, it often reproduces them – sometimes even amplifying them through internal rivalries over access to resources and recognition.
A similar tone resonates in Christian places of worship. In one province, a bishop – speaking with the caution required of his role as spiritual leader of the “Family of God Church” – delivered a sermon filled with compassion for farmers, the majority of whom are Christian. He proclaimed that “blood has been shed on our land,” that “innocents have died,” and that “the farmers’ fields” had been ravaged18. Though he did not directly name Quranic schools, his sermon evoked them through accusatory spiritual language. His speech reproduced key identity markers of sedentary communities – farming, land, Christianity – and reflected a veiled yet clear stance within the public debate. In doing so, it reinforced the idea of growing religious polarisation surrounding agropastoral conflict.
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Understanding agropastoral conflicts in southern Chad requires moving beyond simplistic interpretations that reduce these antagonisms to a clash between “peanut fields” and “cattle hooves”. The sociological approach adopted here has sought to interrogate the categories of “herder” and “farmer”, which are often essentialised, by showing how they are socially constructed – shaped by power relations, religious and geographic affiliations, migration dynamics, and contrasting economic logics. By mobilising the concept of the religious economy, this article has argued that these conflicts are not solely about livestock mobility, but rather about the strategies of actors situated at the intersection of religious, political, and economic registers. Religious entrepreneurship is one – though not the only – factor in this complex configuration.
More broadly, these confrontations cannot be reduced to binary oppositions: farmer vs. herder, sedentary vs. nomadic, Muslim vs. Christian, North vs. South. Instead, they reflect differentiated – and at times competing – concerns linked to survival within rural contexts undergoing profound transformation, marked by heightened competition for scarce resources. Rather than clarifying the nature of these conflicts, such binary framings often intensify them, by assigning collective blame that fails to account for the diversity of individual trajectories and strategic positioning. The violence that now afflicts entire regions of Chad underscores, in reverse, the urgency for the state to reclaim its role as a regulating force in the face of rural transformation.
1 Le Pays « Conflits éleveurs-agriculteurs dans le Lac Iro : plus d’une quinzaine de morts et une vingtaine de blessés », Journal Le Pays, https://www.lepaystchad.com/25128/, 2022.
2 Alwihda Info, « Tchad : Un affrontement entre agriculteurs et éleveurs à Nya-Pendé fait un mort et plusieurs blessés », Alwihda Info – Actualités TCHAD, Afrique, International https://www.alwihdainfo.com/Tchad-Un-affrontement-entre-agriculteurs-et-eleveurs-a-Nya-Pende-fait-un-mort-et-plusieurs-blesses_a133493.html, 2024.
3 OCHA, « Tchad : Aperçu des conflits inter/intracommunautaires », https://www.unocha.org/publications/report/chad/tchad-apercu-des-conflits-interintracommunautaires-juillet-2024, 2024.
4 JACQUEMOT, Pierre, « Les États et la « gestion apaisée » du pastoralisme. Afrique contemporaine », 274, 2022, 147–155.
5 LEFORT-RIEU, Claire, « Du conflit d’usages au prisme communautaire : penser les conflits agropastoraux et leurs réponses à l’est du Cameroun (régions de l’Adamaoua et de l’Est) », Afrique contemporaine, 274, 2022, 51–69.
6 MBA, Jean-Émile, & NOUFFEUSSIE, Leopold Ngueuta, « Conflits intercommunautaires au Cameroun : une rationalisation néo-causale au prisme des interférences intra et extraterritoriales », Afrique contemporaine 274, 2022, 97–121
7 U.S. Department of State. 2023 Report on International Religious Freedom. https://www.state.gov/reports/2023-report-on-international-religious-freedom/ (2023).
8 MAGNANT, Jean-Pierre, « Du grand prêtre au roi : les origines religieuses des Etats anciens du Tchad », in Jean-Pierre CHRETIEN (dir), L’invention religieuse en Afrique : histoire et religion en Afrique noire, Paris : Karthala, 1993, 159–178.
9 ZELTNER, Jean-Claude, Histoire des Arabes sur les rives du lac Tchad, Paris : Karthala, 2002.
10 MAISTRE, Casimir, La Région Du Bahr-Sara, Montpellier : Imprimerie centrale du midi, 1902.
11 DUMONT, Fernand, La pensée religieuse d’Amadou Bamba, Dakar : Les Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1975.
12 ELA, Jean-Marc, Travail et Entreprise En Afrique : Les Fondements Sociaux de la Réussite Économique, Paris : Karthala, 2006.
13 LADIBA, Gondeu, L’émergence des organisations islamiques au Tchad : Enjeux, acteurs et territoires, Paris : L’Harmattan, 2011.
14 Attestation d’attribution de terrain à une école coranique, 2013.
15 Correspondance du chef de canton aux conseillers islamiques et hommes de bonne volonté pour le développement de l’islam dans le monde, 2015.
16 Communiqué de presse du Comité de crise relatif à l’attaque des terroristes dans le Département, 2022.
17 Conseil supérieur des Affaires islamiques, Autorisation de fonctionner à une école coranique, 2015
18 Vatican News, « Tchad : l’évêque de Sarh appelle à la justice suite au conflit dans le département du Lac-Iro », https://www.vaticannews.va/fr/afrique/news/2022-09/tchad-l-eveque-de-sarh-appelle-a-la-justice-suite-au-conflit-da.html, 2022.
i Interview with the founder of a Quranic school, September 2023.
ii Ibid.
iii Interview with a Quranic school founder, November 2023.
iv Interview with a Quranic school founder, October 2023.
v Interview with the director of a Quranic school, September 2023.
vi Interview with a village chief, November 2023.
vii Interview with a Quranic school student, November 2023.
viii Interview with a student-turned-entrepreneur living in a Quranic school, October 2023.
ix Interview with a local farmer.